THE GUIDE
Over the course of painting outdoors I have collated a list of notes for myself, things to avoid, ways to improve, what to watch out for and so on. These notes have been summarised into a guide that I hope will support your journey in watercolour.
The key: internalise the scene
The key to painting outdoors is to internalise the scene before you paint it. Sit with the place and look until it has moved you and you know what it means to you. Then the painting comes from inside you, not from copying what is in front of you. It is what the place did to you, put down quickly and cleanly, with everything else taken away.
Everything in this guide serves that idea. You prepare slowly so the scene becomes yours, simplify so only what you took in remains, paint with few, decided strokes while it is still fresh, and stop once it has been said. The thread through all of it is control and release: be exact in the preparation so you can be free in the stroke. Poetry comes in the gap between your decisions.
1. Feeling before appearance
Go beyond the surface of things. Take in the atmosphere of a place and express your response to it, letting the form serve the brushmark. If you only imitate nature, you will always come out second best.
- Expression, not record. A camera gives you the mechanical instant. Painting on site keeps the instant as you felt it, with the wind, the cloud and the water moving, and your own heart moving with them. A picture can be correct and dead, or loose and alive. Aim for alive.
- Alike, yet unlike. Think of the painting as a kite. It can fly as high into abstraction as you like, but the string must never be cut. The string ties it back to the place and the feeling you shared there, and it is how the viewer holds on and follows you up.
- What you paint matters. I feel it’s important to paint thing you enjoy and to be honest about what you wish to convey. It could be an object, the light, atmosphere or colours.
2. Prepare: think slowly, paint swiftly
- Wait for it. Ask what you want to capture and why. If you cannot put it into words, sit in front of the subject and watch until it touches you. Without that pull, the work has no purpose. If the view is dull, rely more on your imagination.
- Choose less. One subject, and one or two elements painted well. The rest will suggest itself.
- Sketch until you see shapes. Make small drawings and watercolour sketches until the object loses its meaning as an object and becomes line and shape. Then it will serve the brush.
- Fix the composition first. Do not start until you are sure of the overall structure, and do not add compositional ideas once you are into details.
3. Simplify
Sort what you see into three kinds of thing.
Structural: paint it. It directs the eye, creates movement, establishes hierarchy, or divides the space meaningfully.
Supportive: simplify it. It helps, but nobody should notice it.
Space: leave it. Do not be afraid to leave the white of the paper.
Lose edges. The question is not how much you can put in, but how many edges you can lose. The more you put in, the less you see. The essence of watercolour is in its edges, so choose the few you keep and decide where they are hard and where soft. Form can be suggested by wash alone.
Shapes. Use big soft shapes and small hard ones. Break them and connect them so that subject and background run into each other. Let some parts be realistic and others abstract: give the viewer enough to know what is there, and their mind will fill the gaps.
Centre and colour.
- A strong focal point comes from putting the lightest light, the darkest dark, the strongest colour or the sharpest edge in the same place. Lighten the background to give it weight.
- Colour is carried by shapes: it changes in hue through the wash and ends where another shape begins. Repeat colours for harmony.
- You do not always need to warm a shape. Sometimes cooling the one next to it does the work.
Quirks make a painting interesting, so do not normalise, and avoid regularity.
4. Paint: water and timing
Watercolour is transparent and fluid, and it only goes one way: you cannot go back. Use this rather than fight it.
- Wet. Washes bleeding into each other are the beauty of the medium. If you wet the paper, work wet in wet.
- Half-wet. When the paper is neither wet nor dry, you get the most beautiful edges. Watercolour is all about timing.
- Clean. Do not mix too many colours, or the wash turns to mud. Use less pigment than you think.
- Dry. Dry-brush texture and hard edges belong on dry paper. Paint dries lighter than it looks wet.
Chance and skill. Chance is how pigment, water and paper behave as the wash dries; skill is your control. Chance shaped by skill becomes more open and varied, and skill that lets some chance in makes the work more alive.
5. The mark, and knowing when to stop
Fewer, decided strokes
- Say it in as few strokes as you can. Count them the way you count your money. Try to capture a tree in one stroke.
- Spend more time observing and mixing than painting: make a stroke, then consider it. Nothing is so ugly in a painting as indecision, so make a decision and stay with it.
- Paintings often look best early on. Learn to see the moment, then leave it alone.
- Fixing and lifting out usually make it worse.
- Ask yourself: at what point does this painting become too known? The strongest moments often come just before complete resolution, when forms are emerging but not fully fixed.
- If you are unsure, do not do it. Stop before the painting asks for more.
- And go back. Return to the same places, every day if you can, and go deeper into the lives of the things you paint. Painting is playful, so enjoy it, and be still like the tree until the thoughts fade and you are really there.
6. Out there
- Accept the limits. Time is short and the light changes. You are not there to paint a detailed masterpiece, so work without expectation and do not let people distract you.
- Sketches and memory over photographs. Do not let a photograph decide for you. Work from what you sketched on site, and from your memory of what held your interest.
- Go back. Return to the same places, every day if you can, and go deeper into the lives of the things you paint. Every day not spent painting is a step backwards.
- If you are teaching, the aim of a session outdoors is not a good painting but to take people through the difficulties they will meet outside.
7. The state of mind
- Calm effort. Do not try too hard. You have to make an effort to stop yourself making an effort.
- Play. Painting is playful. Enjoy it.
- Be present. Painting is a kind of meditation. Be still, like the tree, until the thoughts fade and you are there.
- Step back. Be one with the painting while you work. To decide whether it is finished, look at it like a witness.
8. Preliminary Exercises
Sit and watch the subject (10 minutes). Do not paint.
Then paint a small thumbnail of the scene in two tones, you can look at the subject and simplify lights into the white of the paper and darks into black. Decide what’s important and simplify areas that are competing.
Do a black and white study again but this time challenge yourself not to look at the subject. Focus on creating harmony in the light and dark shapes.
You can do these black and white studies several times adding more tones as you progress. The goal is to create a mind image that has a harmony of light and dark shapes and expresses your interest in the scene.
Before beginning focus on your idea allow your internal response to well up inside. Then begin painting.
Field card
Three questions to carry outdoors:
What moved me here, and have I taken it in?
How many edges can I lose?
At what point does this painting become too known?